Digital artist stAllio's WordPad databending

This article was taken from the February 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

art with an unexpected tool -- WordPad. stAllio!, also known as Indianapolis resident Benjamin Berg, 34, discovered "glitching" by running the contents of his hard drive through musicsoftware.

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As the program tried to read non-musical data as sound, it created screams and crackles, the raw materials of glitch music.

Experimenting with other formats, he hit on the WordPad effect.

Simply opening an image in Microsoft's text editor and then resaving it would disrupt colours and composition. He could guess at the outcome but could not control it -- until recently. "WordPad warps an image file by adding bytes, one for every 0A, 0B or 0D in the file," he explains. "If you use a hex editor to change those values to 09, the image stays the same." So by adding and deleting bytes by hand, he could make the image glitch in specific ways when opened and resaved in WordPad.

Berg builds "databends" with dramatic effects. "Glitch art is a dance on the edge of a failing system," he says. "Most people know WordPad is crap. The idea of an image edited in WordPad packs a punch."